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What does a mastodon server represent? A geographic community? An interest group? A virtual community? Else?
it's really a strange limitation of the technology that was decided upon over time. We need a canonical way to find content and a name linked to a uri was the most straight forward way to get there at the time. I have a server of just me so my server represents my identity. You are currently on a server with half a million other people so your server represents a large city.

that's almost like running your own email server, which is probably an overkill for most people. I have my own domain for my email, but most people would just use gmail (akin to mastodon.social).

What I'm thinking about is should I have multiple mastodon accounts on different servers? I'd rather not to.

I host my own decentralized social media #Friendica node and I use a custom domain for email but I would never run my own mail server.

With regards to your initial question, mastodon.social is more a convenience than anything else. All their users are united by the common fact they didn’t have to look for another Mastodon instance to register an account on the #Fediverse. I don’t mean this negatively, convenience is a valuable quality.